Men Who Talk about Love in Late Medieval Spain: Hugo de Urriés and Egalitarian Married Life

In the last third of the fifteenth century, Hugo de Urriés’s work can offer the modern reader a very rare and informative perspective from the points of view of social history and history of ideas. The Dezir del casamiento (Poem of Marriage) is a very extensive moralising poem written by Aragonese courtier Hugo de Urriés, known by critics as the devout lover of Spanish courtly literature because of his very unusual autobiographical celebration of his life with his wife. The poem is an enthusiastic encomium that was completely alien to the Castilian mainstream courtly canon.This article analyses the literary, philosophical and religious traditions informing Urriés’s writing as well as the social, biographical, and historical circumstances shaping his ideas about gender relations. The methodology of this work serves the purpose of going beyond erudite study of texts, traditions and sources and tries to reflect intimate experiences and beliefs of real people about marriage, perhaps the most important and visible regulator of personal relationships between men and women in the period prior to the changes introduced by the Council of Trent. The article identifies the universal thinking behind Urriés’s idyllic account of his life as a married man